“Suicide of the West” is not a very good book

Last week I got into a discussion on Twitter with a long-time conservative reader who was upset about something he called “tribalism.” We went back and forth for a while but I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about, and then I remembered that I had recently heard the National Review “The Editors” podcast endorse a book by an NRO staffer named Jonah Goldberg called “Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy.”

I figured that rather than bug my reader on Twitter for answers he couldn’t give me, I’d go right to the source. If anyone could explain tribalism to me, it would be the guy who wrote the book on it! I was wrong.

A book about big eternal ideas that’s relentlessly, tiresomely focused on the present

Goldberg is a conservative ideologue, but his ideology is based entirely on the conservative grievances of late 2017. A few examples:

“Barack Obama said in his Farewell Address:

“‘Our Constitution is a remarkable, beautiful gift. But it’s really just a piece of parchment. It has no power on its own. We, the people, give it power—with our participation, and the choices we make. Whether or not we stand up for our freedoms. Whether or not we respect and enforce the rule of law. America is no fragile thing. But the gains of our long journey to freedom are not assured.’

Taken on its face this is a remarkable confession of motivated reasoning.

“The question almost surely was intended to be rhetorical in the same way the organizers of an essay competition at Oberlin asking ‘Has diversity made us stronger?’ would simply assume the contest was over who would most creatively—or loyally—answer ‘Yes'” (p. 135).

How did the big scary liberal arts college in Ohio hurt you, Jonah?

“I’ve tried to avoid making explicitly partisan arguments, but attention must be paid to the insidious and incestuous relationship between the Democratic Party and government unions. It is no accident that the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents the IRS, gave about 96 percent of its political donations during the 2016 election cycle to Democratic candidates” (pp. 196-197).

This one is particularly incoherent because the book is a paean to the role of non-state organizations in giving life meaning. Then he just hangs a huge asterisk on his thesis that reads: “except unions.”

Does the Constitution “work?”

There is a version of the history of American civilization that goes like this: the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights embody a set of universal ideals that the Founders fell far short of. However, those shortcomings have been addressed one-by-one by subsequent generations, which have used the universal promise of the founding ideals to correct injustice after injustice to better bring America in line with her values.

This is a story with obvious appeal. It means the genocide of the native population of North America, slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, restriction of the franchise to men, Chinese exclusion, Japanese-American internment, segregation, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, redlining, police violence, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, stop-and-frisk, purges of the voter rolls, gerrymandering, are not features of our constitutional order, but violations of it or even attacks on it.

And this is more or less the story Goldberg tells, although he would not put it in exactly these words: we have a Constitution of ideals, which each generation seeks to make more imminent in the lives of the people.

There is a problem with this story, however, and that is the fact that at each turning point in this story, those fighting to fulfill the ideals of the Constitution have been confronted by those who insist the true meaning of the Constitution lies is the status quo or a reversion to an earlier, less just order.

Why The South Must Prevail

In 1957, William F. Buckley, a father of the modern conservative movement and the founder of National Review (Jonah Goldberg’s employer), published a short column which is worth reading in full, headlined “Why The South Must Prevail.” He wrote:

“The central question that emerges-and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is
answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal-is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes-the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Jonah Goldberg is many vile things (an apologist for torture not least of them), but I don’t know if he’s a racist or not, and am not trying to imply that writing for a magazine founded by a racist that spouted racist vitriol for decades makes you a racist by association. That inference is left to the reader.

What I am saying is that it has always been the business of conservatives to insist that whatever progress has just been achieved in fulfilling the ideals of the Constitution is the last work that needed to be done, and all further work should be abandoned.

It has become unfashionable to remember that George W. Bush ran for reelection in 2004 on a campaign of amending the Constitution to ban marriages, nationwide, between people of the same gender. Today, with the right to marry the person of your choice upheld by the Supreme Court, the very same people insist that the work of equality is done. “This far and no further” is always the order of the day.

The coincidence theory of conservative politics

All this feeds into what I call the “coincidence theory” of conservative politics, which takes two main forms:

The coincidence of timing says that whatever era a conservative is born into happens to have finally settled once and for all every important issue, or might have gone a bit too far.

The coincidence of reason says that when you apply logic and reason to a problem, you happen to arrive at exactly the conservative’s preferred policy.

I discussed the coincidence of timing above, but Goldberg also illustrates the coincidence of reason in his attack on the minimum wage:

“At least in the medieval guilds it was understood that giving an inexperienced worker an apprenticeship—i.e., a shot at learning a trade—was something of great value. The wage, if there even was one, was trivial compared to the opportunity to learn how to be a blacksmith, mason, or tanner. That was the path to prosperity. First jobs, particularly for unskilled non-college-educated young workers, play the same role. If you work hard and learn the business at, say, McDonald’s, you will likely be promoted to assistant manager before the year is out. That is invaluable experience. Raising the minimum wage above what employers can bear or to the level where hiring an iPad makes more sense is immoral, because it is tantamount to taxing entry-level jobs. If there is anything more settled in economics than the proposition that taxing an activity reduces that activity, I don’t know what it is. To say that the minimum wage should be a ‘living wage’ is to tell employers they must pay inexperienced workers above their value, and that is unsustainable” (p. 204).

What’s obvious is that our policy beliefs are upstream of our political beliefs. You can see by Goldberg’s story about the minimum wage that he did not start with a set of beliefs about the medieval guild system and then deduce his view on the minimum wage from that; he started with a belief about the minimum wage and then worked backwards from that to a just-so story about medieval guilds.

The coincidence of reason is not unique to conservatives, but in my experience they are uniquely incapable of acknowledging it. Leftists who want to raise the minimum wage do not pretend to start with an elaborate just-so story about “returns to capital being above their historical norm and government intervention being necessary to recalibrate the economy-wide return to capital and labor.” They start with a story about the need to raise the minimum wage, and then explain how capital can afford to pay for it because of the enormous profits capital is currently earning.

Everyone is entitled to marshal the most convincing available arguments for their preferred policy views. But if you find someone who believes those arguments caused their policy views, or that their policy views are the inevitable or necessary consequence of some external feature of the world, you are dealing with someone who does not, or is pretending not to, understand how political beliefs are actually formed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn anything about “tribalism”

I was excited, 200 pages into “Suicide of the West,” to arrive at Chapter 10, “Tribalism Today: Nationalism, Populism, and Identity Politics.” Finally, I thought, I’d get some answers about what this “tribalism” business is all about and what’s so horrible about it.

I did not, but to explain why not, it’s worth quoting the core of Goldberg’s thesis, as near as I can identify it:

“We still believe that the government shouldn’t exclude some groups based upon arbitrary prejudices. But the rest of the melting-pot formula is breaking down in three ways. First, we are now taught that the government should give special preferences to some groups. Second, as a cultural imperative, we are increasingly told that we should judge people based upon the group they belong to. Assimilation is now considered a dirty word. And last, we are taught that there is no escaping from our group identity” (p. 211).

I think Goldberg’s formulation is useful because a slight reformulation puts it in direct contrast with the actual beliefs of progressives in America today:

First, the government gives special preferences to some groups. Redlining, for example, is a practice that prevented the residents of predominantly black neighborhoods from receiving federally backed mortgages and accumulating housing wealth. FHA loans were a special preference given to the white residents of white neighborhoods.

Second, people are judged based on the group they belong or are perceived to belong to. Race science, as practiced by Charles Murray and his acolytes, who are quoted extensively throughout “Suicide of the West,” is a systematic, comprehensive, negative judgment on the value of African-American culture and civilization, and elevation of white European culture and civilization.

Some interesting points here but I have one gripe with your use of the author’s medieval guilds analogy.

Everyone at one time or another has delivered an opinion in the a posteriori fashion. It’s a compelling and digestible way to structure your arguments, and it’s a great primer for a nostalgic narrative. Doesn’t make it right, just acknowledging that it’s common and effective.

I think it’s fine to identify this practice and call out the author for his insincerity. But to segue immediately into a partisan bashfest by wielding this excerpt as a counter-nuke against a broad political ideology is kind of silly to me. And I can’t help but wonder if it implicates the same insincerity that you’re criticizing.

I’m always keen to read a book review, but I felt this post morphed into a manifesto towards the end. Good write up overall though, I enjoyed it.

Thanks for reading, and if you think I’m misrepresenting or being unfair to Goldberg’s argument you’re of course welcome to pick up the book yourself. Hell, I’m happy to send you my copy.

Re: the medieval guilds, as I said in the review, everyone is entitled to muster what they believe is the strongest argument for their point of view. My point is merely that the non-falsifiable, “just-so” stories conservatives tell themselves about their political beliefs are not convincing, and they’re not convincing because they are obviously constructed after the formation of the underlying policy preference. The historical fantasies conservatives rely on to justify their existing policy preferences are like an escape hatch to avoid confronting the real-world consequences of their policy preferences (see William F. Buckley’s just-so story about the “advanced” white race).

To give an example from a totally different context, it’s become extremely fashionable among conservatives to justify (paper)work requirements for healthcare and food benefits by insisting on the “dignity of work.” But, like Goldberg’s fantasy of the medieval guilds or the McDonald’s employee who becomes assistant manager “within a year,” you know that’s not the actual motivation for the policy belief because meeting paperwork requirements is extremely undignified. The policy preference is to cut spending on income support, the policy mechanism is to impose increasingly onerous paperwork requirements, and the policy justification is the “dignity of work.” My only point is that this method of argumentation is extremely unconvincing, and I find forthright arguments for the underlying policy preference more convincing.

I want to raise the minimum wage because then the minimum wage would be higher, I want to reduce zoning restrictions because then building would be easier, I want to simplify the tax code because then the tax code would be simpler. My policy beliefs follow from my values, but I don’t invent just-so stories about the role of a simple tax code in the industrial revolution. I want the tax code to be simpler so that it will be simpler!

I think of tribalism as an unwillingness to apply standards and values on a consistent basis.

A non-tribal mindset might lead one to say, “I should not heap abuse and vitriol upon everyone who writes for a publication based on the views of the founder (editor, etc.) of the publication if the publication has since rejected those views.”

A tribal mindset will lead one to say, “the above does not apply to out-group a-hole publications.”

Indeed, I went to great lengths to distance the founder of National Review from the opinions of its current employees. Rather, my point was that the thing they have in common is not their masthead, but their belief that no work remains to be done in achieving the ideals they believe the Constitution embodies.

As I predicted, responses displayed no attempt to actually respond to the historical and continuing facts of systematic government repression which you highlighted based on group identities other than rich white male, i.e. tribalism, only in favor of one particular group. Astoundingly, Raphael used the “out-group” language to describe a publication which has been a bastion of the most in-group in history. It’s this victimization narrative that the current conservative group has succeeded on that’s most amazing.

The middle to lower income group that’s been squeezed most by international trade without labor/environmental standards, wink-wink open immigration, and tax and labor rules heavily weighted towards corporate management has rushed to give their votes to the very group most responsible for those things happening. They go along with scapegoating minority groups so that they don’t have to accept being hoodwinked by the GOP’s divisive appeals.

GOP (ideologically driven, divisive, no-compassion for vulnerable/minorities/weak/old/young/immigrants/women, anti-middleclass, anti-lowerincomeclass, anti-science, anti-education, anti-climate…).. What is left is “mostly” bunch of 40yr old White folks..who will blame all their problems on the immigrants/weak/vulnerable..They have been brought up by their parents and grand-parents, friends, neighbors with that mentality.. They see “what they want to see”!
GOP is ALWAYS on the wrong-side of the fence..

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